“Personally, I feel turnstiles equal another obstacle to public transport use. I question both the pervasiveness of fare evasion and the assertion that turnstiles will have a significant impact on eliminating fare cheats. I feel our tax dollars would be far better spent on making the SkyTrain and the city’s bus routes more efficient and more accessible. Sorry to have missed the focus group, hope there will be another one soon.”

I imagine many people who fare jump because they’re only going 1 or 2 stations will take a cab, increasing emissions. The homeless will have their freedom of movement hampered. This is quite simply a desperate cash grab by a bankrupt transit authority with no democratic input into their decision making. They need to pay for their 3 brand new bridges across the Fraser because they’re not getting the amount of drivers that were projected. So they raise the fares to pay for turn-styles that may or may not actually do anything, as Mr. Rees pointed out.

The question is will it put off as many riders as it makes up for skipped fares? I personally think the balance is going to be pretty near center. When lines start forming and people are no longer able to run to catch their trains because… of these turnstiles, more people are going to abandon the inconvenience in favour of private automobiles.

My advice would be to get the highest-paid police force to actually police our transit system instead of having the public finance their social hours when they stand around in their gaggles at whatever random station. Go to Metrotown Station, now, and I give you 2-to-1 odds you’ll find one such gaggle laughing and having a good old time at the tax-payer’s expense on that platform. Main Street/Science World is another good place to spot the rather unelusive Transit Police public teat-sucker.

All my Google-fu seems to indicate that the article you linked too has been taken offline; there are dozens of links to it from the day it was posted but they are all 404 offline now. Curious. But I was able to locate this response to the article in Toronto Life’s blog.

The assertion that turnstiles will somehow make transit safer is also not based on reality. One of the least safe systems in recent years was the New York subway – and that had very effective gates on it, but inadequate policing. That, of course, was rectified. Do we have to relearn the same lessons?